Accountability on My Earnings Calls

On Monday we looked at the estimate trends for the company's reporting this week to see if we could discern who was at risk and who had the opportunity for upside.

Of course, if we are out predicting we have to take the credit or blame. So how did I do? Let's look at the names I called out as having meaningful trends we could play. (Most of the names were indeterminate, the estimates were not moving and we had no opinion.)

Below is a table of my highlighted names, and the actual results, with some comments.

As we noticed Monday, all is not well in the energy patch. The refiners were absolutely destroyed as margins shrunk, even in the face of stellar revenue growth. Valero (VLO) and Tesoro (TSO) missed by even more than the already-shrunken estimates. ExxonMobil (XOM) ended up staying flat on EPS, but underperformed the big rally in the market. The Cabot (CBT) EPS was actually not comparable due to special items, but the revenue missed.

Acme Packet (APKT) only missed slightly, but the guidance was poor and the stock got clocked for more than 10% after hours. In contrast, Whirlpool (WHR) beat big and the stock rallied huge on the beat, up 16%. Vertex (VRTX) and Blackstone (BX) were generally in line, with the stocks not doing much in reaction.

Overall, not a bad performance. We did get some predictive ability by looking at the estimate trends. We'll repeat this exercise next week with the next wave of earnings reports and see how we can do.

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